[mfer]

On a regular basis I use Teams, Zoom, and Jitsi for video conferencing. Teams isn't the most troublesome of the set.

> I'm sure this is just Microsoft unifying everyone on the same comms platform, but seriously, I don't know anyone who chooses Teams.

In big companies like GitHub people don't typically choose their own video conference platform. It's picked for them.

For Microsoft I can see a huge benefit to using Teams at GitHub. That's cost. Microsoft can use Teams at cost. That's a better price that those outside Microsoft can get it. It's a better deal than paying for Zoom. At a time when expenses are being cut it's hard to justify paying for a competitors platform.

[epolanski]

> In big companies like GitHub people don't typically choose their own video conference platform. It's picked for them.

Yes, for larger meetings that applies.

Realistically, people will ping each other and video call on slack/hangouts/whatever if they don't like company's choice.

[d_sem]

In my Big Company (400,000+ employees) it is not permitted to use other systems to host meeting without authorization. Using unapproved software is strictly not allowed. There can be plenty of reasons including business data security, legal data retention, international data privacy laws, licensing agreements, etc.

I remember when Skype was considered controversial because indication of working status and access to employees after business hours was potential a violation of workers rights and privacy laws.

[foobaw]

400,000+? I don't mean to question this but that's a crazy high number assuming it's not Amazon or Walmart.

[ska]

At a guess there's at least 20 companies with head counts that high, and most of them aren't tech and retail.

[tstrimple]

Was that a guess? It was an impressive one. There seems to be 21 companies with 400k+ people.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/largest-companies-by-number-o...

[ska]

Huh, it was but I can't take credit for being clever about it, just simple order of magnitude estimation with a factor: e.g. I thought of a handful I was pretty sure were 500k+, rounded up to 10, then doubled as I know I don't know much about the space.

[d1sxeyes]

Much much more than that in case OP is not in the US.

[d_sem]

Globally there are many large companies of this size.

[vxNsr]

I’m trying to understand a world where employees at a large org will install a random comms client instead of just using what’s already installed. I worked at a place that used IBM sametime until they migrated off lotus notes. No one used anything else, because why? You’d need to convince every other person you wanted to talk to use it too, was much easier to just use the existing app.

[tstrimple]

Often these tools are adopted by smaller teams for their communication. So official company meetings would happen over teams, but bitching at Bob because he still hasn’t reviewed your PR would happen in Slack. It can make information management a nightmare, especially when users start sharing files with each other via Slack.

[spunker540]

Most big co’s make it pretty clear to employees that it’s a pretty big no-no to discuss proprietary work through an unaudited 3rd party (especially a competitor).

[sundaeofshock]

Big Company can make it very difficult to use an alternative to the preferred tool. Blocking network traffic or restrictions on what binaries can be installed on corporate computers can be very effective at keeping the team using the same chat client.

[watwut]

I is not just video conferencing. Teams sux if you need many ad-hoc working groups based on topics or small teams. Meaning, they sux for exactly the kind of work developers do.

[airpoint]

Curious now, which one would you say is the most troublesome in your experience out of those three then? And why…

[nl]

Not the OP, but Jitsi is terrible.

For me, ranked:

Zoom

Google Meet

Discord

Slack

Teams

Anything else

[vineyardmike]

> Jitsi is terrible.

But it gets points for being open source and self hostable. I appreciate that.

For me, it’s

Google Meet (best UI, I like the waiting room, etc)

Amazon Chime (I like the ringing features, integrated chat)

Jitsi (OSS etc)

Zoom (It’s ok, yes, but the company is questionable and the UI is so so)

Etc

Teams (never used tbh, but I used corporate Skype before rebranding and it never worked right)

[nortonham]

zoom is a questionable company but somehow Google or Amazon are not.......

[vineyardmike]

Yes. Zoom executives directly working for china to disrupt users calls that were anti-china. They later formally added Chinese-gov related takedowns in their TOS.

Before the pandemic, apple had to remove their Mac app because it was basically a virus.

Google and Amazon aren't perfect, but you can use their video calls without worrying that an executive will dislike the content of your call and mess with you. And they don't use anti-patterns to try and route you from the web app to installing a virus.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/technology/zoom-tiananmen...

https://www.wired.com/story/zoom-bug-webcam-hackers/ https://lifehacker.com/remove-zoom-from-your-mac-right-now-1...

[nl]

I'm too old to put up with software that doesn't work sorely because it is open source.

[YoshiRulz]

I'm too old to put up with software that doesn't work solely because it is closed-source and so doesn't accept patches :P Trying to get rid of the Discord client at the moment...